Cooling solutions of that size equipped with 3 fans at a time are pretty rare even for CPUs. But today we are going to talk about a cooler like that designed for a … graphics card! Read more about the VGA solution from Arctic Cooling in our new review.

PCB Design and Functionality

The new cooler measures 287 x 104 x 54mm and weighs 680g, which is close to the contemporary CPU cooler dimensions rather than VGA ones. Accelero Xtreme GTX 280 is built on five copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter going through the copper base. They hold two aluminum heatsink arrays cooled with three 92-mm fans:

The cooler is 54mm tall, which means that when you install it into your system, it will block not only the next PCI slot, but also the following slot:

Moreover, to ensure easy airflow to the cooler fans it is recommended to keep the third PCI-E slot empty as well.

The heatpipes inside the heatsink are all lined up in a little curve:

I don’t understand completely why they did it this way, because the curve is too small to lower the airflow resistance, for instance. As for more even heat distribution over the heatsink, this curve will hardly improve it. So, let’s consider it a small alignment production issue.

The fans are attached to a plastic frame that can be removed from the heatsink completely. This is what it looks like without the fans:

There is an aluminum heatsink right above the cooler base and the heatpipes coming out of it. This heatsink is soldered to the heatpipes, and the heatpipes – to the copper cooler base plate:

There is Arctic MX-2 thermal interface already pre-applied onto the center of the base plate. It is one of the best thermal compounds today: